Review: Ready Player One

  Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Blurb from Goodreads: It's the year 2044, and the real world is an ugly place.

Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, a place where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets.

And like most of humanity, Wade dreams of being the one to discover the ultimate lottery ticket that lies concealed within this virtual world. For somewhere inside this giant networked playground, OASIS creator James Halliday has hidden a series of fiendish puzzles that will yield massive fortune--and remarkable power--to whoever can unlock them.

For years, millions have struggled fruitlessly to attain this prize, knowing only that Halliday's riddles are based in the pop culture he loved--that of the late twentieth century. And for years, millions have found in this quest another means of escape, retreating into happy, obsessive study of Halliday's icons. Like many of his contemporaries, Wade is as comfortable debating the finer points of John Hughes's oeuvre, playing Pac-Man, or reciting Devo lyrics as he is scrounging power to run his OASIS rig.

And then Wade stumbles upon the first puzzle.

Suddenly the whole world is watching, and thousands of competitors join the hunt--among them certain powerful players who are willing to commit very real murder to beat Wade to this prize. Now the only way for Wade to survive and preserve everything he knows is to win. But to do so, he may have to leave behind his oh-so-perfect virtual existence and face up to life--and love--in the real world he's always been so desperate to escape.

A world at stake.
A quest for the ultimate prize.
Are you ready?

I think I should probably preface this by declaring: I AM A HUGE NERD. As in... I did marching band for 8 years in a row in high school and college, my D&D character is a dwarf barbarian, and I have a huge fangirl crush on Wil Wheaton. So I am going to surmise that this is one of the reasons I loved this book so much. 

Another reason is my love of 80's music and movies. Any book that references Ferris Bueller (FAVORITE MOVIE EVER) three times by page 65 is probably going to be a winner for me. While I know little to nothing about the classic video games of this era, missing out on a lot of those references did nothing to diminish my experience of reading this book, so don't let that stop you from trying it. 

Cline did a great job with the treasure-hunting aspect of the story, keeping the tension at a high enough level that I HAD to stay up last night to finish. I especially enjoyed the sections when Cline explored the culture of this world he created: a society based around an MMO game. People in this book pretty much abandoned their real lives in favor of a virtual one, and although this trope has been used in dystopian/sci-fi novels before, it still made for an interesting, fun read.

Review: Leviathan Wakes

 Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Blurb from Goodreads: Humanity has colonized the solar system - Mars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt and beyond - but the stars are still out of our reach. 

Jim Holden is XO of an ice miner making runs from the rings of Saturn to the mining stations of the Belt. When he and his crew stumble upon a derelict ship, "The Scopuli," they find themselves in possession of a secret they never wanted. A secret that someone is willing to kill for - and kill on a scale unfathomable to Jim and his crew. War is brewing in the system unless he can find out who left the ship and why. 

Detective Miller is looking for a girl. One girl in a system of billions, but her parents have money and money talks. When the trail leads him to "The Scopuli" and rebel sympathizer Holden, he realizes that this girl may be the key to everything. 

Holden and Miller must thread the needle between the Earth government, the Outer Planet revolutionaries, and secretive corporations - and the odds are against them. But out in the Belt, the rules are different, and one small ship can change the fate of the universe. 

This book took me longer than it normally would to finish because I have been really busy finishing up summer semester. But every time I picked it up, I went "Oh yeah! Why haven't I been reading more of this? It's awesome!" It had a whole Firefly vibe going on, which I really loved.

The book was narrated by two different characters, which I think was the most interesting aspect to me, mostly because their viewpoints were SO opposite. One is described as "righteous," but interestingly enough, his actions are ultimately responsible for a lot of the war. The other is a world-weary cop whose mission and experiences drive him to do, well... less than "righteous" things.

Also, it did not end the way I expected it to at ALL. Woooo for plot twists! The ending left me wanting to know more about what happened, which is convenient because the next book in the series, Caliban's War, just came out. Overall, I thought this was an exciting, fast-paced read.

I read this book along with The Sword and Laser (which you should definitely check out if you like sci-fi/fantasy!)

Review: Tigana

Tigana by Guy Gavrial Kay

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Blurb from Goodreads: Eight of the nine provinces of the Peninsula of the Palm, on a world with two moons, have fallen to the warrior sorcerers Brandin of Ygrath and Alberico of Barbadior. Brandin's younger son is slain in a battle with the principality of Tigana, which the grief-stricken sorcerer then destroys. After sweeping down and destroying the remnants of their army, burning their books and destroying their architecture and statuary, he makes it so that no one not born in that province can even hear its name. Years later, a small band of survivors, led by Alessan, last prince of Tigana's royal house, wages psychological warfare, planting seeds for the overthrow of the two tyrants. At the center of these activities are Devin, a gifted young singer; Catriana, a young woman pursued by suspicions of her family's guilt; and Duke Sandre d'Astibar, a wily resistance leader thought dead. Meanwhile, at Brandin's court, Dianora, his favorite concubine and--unknown to anyone, another survivor of Tigana--struggles between her growing love for the often gentle tyrant and her desire for vengeance. Gradually the scene is set for both conquerors to destroy each other and free a land.

I had a hard time rating this one. I would have given it 5 stars except that it was suuuuper slow at the beginning. It took at least 100 pages for me to really get into the story. Other than that, this is one of the best stand-alone fantasy books I've read in a long time.

Also, the resolution was incredibly frustrating to me, but I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. I can appreciate an author who decides not to neatly tie up all the loose ends, or who makes a conclusion ambiguous... even if it sometimes drives me crazy.